A Super Bowl Event That Revealed A Powerful Marketing Secret

“Fentanyl is the new f-word,” announced former CNN/Fox news anchor Laurie Dhue to a room full of NFL legends, business leaders, and media and entertainment celebrities, at the pre-Super Bowl LVII Legends and Leaders Celebration in Phoenix on February 10.

Let me let you in on a powerful marketing secret: If you are going to tackle an opponent as big as fentanyl, you are going to need the power of relationships. (Read on for a 10-step gameplan.)

As one former NFL linebacker speaking at the event put it, those 330-pound in-shape running backs have nothing on fentanyl.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is up to 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. It is a major contributor to an epidemic of fatal overdoses cutting down America’s youth.

The Legends and Leaders Celebration was part of a weeklong series of events led by Roman Gabriel III and his Sold Out Youth Foundation, a charity that offers drug and alcohol abstinence programs in public and private schools, and Scott Hamilton’s Executive Next Practices Institute, a nationwide forum of business leaders. A similar gathering was held in 2022 prior to the Los Angeles Super Bowl and a third relationship-building event is planned in 2024 prior to the Super Bowl in Las Vegas.

In addition to the fun of bidding on collectibles from everybody from Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes to film stars and the Rolling Stones, attendees learned there are two types of fentanyl: pharmaceutical fentanyl and illicitly manufactured fentanyl. Pharmaceutical fentanyl is prescribed by doctors to treat severe pain, especially after surgery and for advanced-stage cancer.

However, the CDC says most recent cases of fentanyl-related overdose are linked to illicitly manufactured fentanyl, which is distributed through illegal drug markets for its heroin-like effect. It is often added to other drugs because of its extreme potency, which makes drugs cheaper, more powerful, more addictive, and more dangerous.

Listen up, agency owners, marketing consultants and entrepreneurs with lofty goals: it takes a team to accomplish greatness.

According to Gabriel, those in attendance share a commitment to defeat the country’s current youth drug, alcohol and mental health crisis.

“Our Sold Out Youth Foundation equips schools, parents and students with a comprehensive program that includes fentanyl understanding and awareness to educate parents and students about the grave dangers this drug poses,” Gabriel said when I interviewed him at the Legends and Leaders event.

For more than 30 years this former pro football player, college coach and now radio and TV broadcaster has delivered stories featuring high-profile athletes and entertainers. Like me he grew up in Southern California in the late 1960s, but he was the son of one of professional football's top quarterbacks, Roman Gabriel II of the Los Angeles Rams.

Today Gabiel III leverages his many relationships—such as media celebs like Dhue, retired NFL stars, business leaders, elected officials, and even super-sports agent Leigh Steinberg, the real-life Jerry Maguire—to team up to fight the fentanyl crisis.

While in Phoenix, I also visited with relationship authority Pamela Slim, author of the bestselling book The Widest Net, to compare notes on how you tackle a problem so big as marketing drug abstinence to youth. She has been helping entrepreneurs around the world build and scale organizations for more than two decades.

Slim gave me ten steps to follow to build great partnerships:

1. Define what you are doing as a problem solved. Slim said, “Once your define your ideal customer by their specific problem or challenge you are ready for the next step: finding other people who solve this problem in a complimentary way.”
2. Look for the jelly to your peanut butter. “Partnerships should be so highly correlated that the connection is obvious to everyone,” says Slim.
3. Date first. “Your biggest risk when partnering is moving too fast,” said Slim. “You would never propose marriage on a first date.”
4. Do your due diligence. “Each partner should feel comfortable asking for specific data to validate the hunch that there will be benefit in working together,” said Slim.
5. Explore your drivers. Slim says great partnerships are sustained by “each partner continually behaving in accordance with shared values.”
6. Define partnership goals. Slim says to get crystal clear upfront about defining partnership goals to ensure that you choose projects, roles and responsibilities that align with those goals.
7. Test the waters. “Even if you see tremendous potential to a business partnership, always start off with a small test project,” said Slim.
8. Everyone signs something. No handshake deals—put it in writing. “Each and every partner should sign something, even for a ‘simple’ project,” said Slim.
9. Build continuous communication. “Agree on a system of communication giving each partner full transparency into the status of every part of the work,” said Slim.
10. Evaluate and invest in the relationship regularly. “Just because you’ve had a successful partnership does not mean that things will continue that way indefinitely,” concluded Slim.

Sounds like Gabriel, Hamilton and their partners are taking a page right out of Pamela Slim’s playbook to fight fentanyl abuse.